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As a Black Friday gift to myself, I bought a Google Chromebook from amazon.com, figure I can’t go wrong with a laptop that’s $329 with FREE 2 years 100MB Verizon 3G data per month. So far my experience with Chromebook is pretty positive. I am happy that I returned MS-Surface (Windows RT) and made a good investment with a gadget like this.

More Chromebook related blog to come, but today I would like to show people how I made Chromebook works with Amazon EC2 access. If you use Amazon AWS services, you know you need to use the PEM key to access your EC2 instance. It is not that straight forward when using a Chromebook, but I found 2 ways to make this work.

Using CROSH

First, we need to download your key to your Chromebook. The easiest way to do this is to copy your key to your Google Drive, and then use your Chromebook to access your Google Drive to download the key. IMPORTANT: don’t know why but Chromebook does not like the .pem extension. If your key file is called “mykey.pem”, please rename it to “mykey” before you uploaded your key to the Google Drive.

Now on your Chromebook, press Ctrl + Alt + t to open a chrosh screen. Once it is opened, type the followings to access your EC2 instance: